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An isolationist policy
History & Masterpieces

An isolationist policy

Thursday, 20 March 2014
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Grégory Gardinetti
Expert and Historian in Watchmaking

“The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.”

Aristote

Whether exhibitions in Mexico City, Moscow and Tokyo, talks to audiences all over the world or specialist articles, infinite ways exist to give the full measure of time.

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2 min read

Japan’s first encounter with mechanical timekeeping came in the sixteenth century, as it did in Geneva. But whereas Calvin’s Protestant doctrine had been the vector in Switzerland, it was Catholicism that brought horology to Japan.

When in 1551 the Spanish Jesuit Saint Francis Xavier, a companion of Ignatius of Loyola, made a gift of a clock to a Japanese dignitary in the hope he would be granted the right to preach there in return. Other missionaries followed suit. These presents that travelled with the missionaries from Europe would be the starting-point for the development of horology in Japan. The oldest such clock still conserved in the country was a gift from King Philip III of Spain to Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1612.

Mechanical time measurement slowly spread through the agency of these missionaries. The Italian Jesuit Alessandro Valignani, who made his first visits to Japan between 1579 and 1582, established a number of colleges and seminaries. Here the Japanese could study under European missionaries who taught them, among other subjects, how to build mechanical clocks and astronomical devices. Also during this period, the blacksmith Sukezaemon Masayuki made the first clock known to be the work of a Japanese craftsman. After repairing and studying various mechanisms imported from Europe, Masayuki began to make clocks of his own in the early seventeenth century. His reputation grew such that he became the personal clockmaker to the Daimyo of Owari.

On the sidelines of scientific discovery

Later developments in time measurement in Japan were largely shaped by the isolationist policy implemented during the first half of the seventeenth century which effectively cut Japan off from the major scientific discoveries being made around the world. As a result, its horology was nipped in the bud, deprived of progress made both in precision and mechanics. For example, the Dutch mathematician, astronomer and physicist Christiaan Huygens adapted the pendulum to the clock in 1657 then eighteen years later developed the balance and spring for the watch; it would be some two hundred years later, in the second half of the nineteenth century, before Japan learned of these major advances in precision timekeeping.

Thus verge and foliot escapements were still used in wadokei, the traditional Japanese clocks whose dial measured time in unequal hours. Each twenty-four hour period was divided into day and night, based on the sun. These two intervals were further divided into six equivalent units which varied according to the seasons; daylight hours were longer in summer than in winter. This characteristic of traditional Japanese clocks distinguished them from European portable clocks of the same period, which have always enumerated the passing of time in hours of strictly equal length.

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